THE WAR OF THE RING & “THE LONG DEFEAT” AGAINST EVIL
J.R.R. Tolkien dreamed up Middle-earth during the
Great War (1914—1918) and wrote most of The Lord of the Rings during World
War II (1939—1945).[1] There can be
no doubt as to “the bellicose environment” of the story – it is a tale both
about a war and was itself forged in the fires of two world wars – the author
having fought in the first and two of his sons bearing arms in the second[2]
while their father put pen to paper.
Is war ever a legitimate response to “evil”? Does The Lord of the Rings offer an
answer to this question? Propaganda[3] has always
been a prominent feature of wars, both to encourage enlistment and to assure
anxious populations that their country’s cause is just[4]
and that their sacrifices are worthwhile.
From medieval Crusades[5] to
“liberate” the Holy Land to modern “crusades” against “the axis of evil”[6], conflicts
have often been couched in cosmic terms as struggles between “good” and “evil”
(presumably, neither side accepts the epithet of “evil”, but chalks it up to
enemy propaganda[7]). Though, in The Lord of the Rings,
“evil” does “reside” primarily in the person of Sauron and the forces of
Mordor, it wields its influence through the One Ring and very few characters
are immune to its corrupting allure. The
question of the (ir)redeemability of the orcs is a fraught one.[8]
Enumerating the ethical dilemmas facing
Britain on the eve of World War II, Nick Groom lists “…identifying legitimate
targets, and defining what actually constituted proportionate force; the
legality of assassination, exceptional rendition, and torture; establishing how
prisoners-of-war were to be treated and the responsibilities of the victors
over the defeated; and the role of civilians – what (if any) discrimination
would be made to prevent civilian casualties?”[9] Since October 7 of this year, these questions
have been repeated ad nauseum by Western media outlets as Israel
continues its military operation in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack which
left over 1,200 Israeli civilians dead, injured or captured.[10] As a novel about war, LOTR[11]
always resonates with current geo-political affairs. But is war a legitimate response to aggression?[12]
There is one “pacifist”[13] in LOTR
– Tom Bombadil! Bombadil is impervious
to the Ring’s influence because the question of the rights and wrongs of power
and control were utterly meaningless to him, and the means of power quite
valueless.[14] Tolkien indicates that Tom Bombadil owes his
continued idyllic existence to his being protected from the forces of Mordor by
those who fight to defend the free peoples of Middle-earth. Tolkien would perhaps have liked to have been
able to lead a Bombadilian life; however, it “was given”[15]
to him to live in the bloodiest century the world had ever seen (as it was
given to Frodo to live during the War of the Ring).[16] For the world that Tolkien inhabited, war was
simply a given – the way things were.[17]
Tolkien considered himself (and his
countrymen) duty-bound to defend their own against the naked aggression of
Hitler’s Reich. In Tolkien’s secondary
world (Middle-earth), the peace of the Shire must be defended, “against all
enemies, foreign and domestic[18]”. Tolkien was well aware that each war created
the conditions for the next one; he saw himself – and his sons – as involved in
“a long defeat”, a perpetual struggle against tyranny which would produce no
lasting victory until the return of the world’s true king.[19] However, as Tolkien reminded his son Christopher,
Providence is always at work, even in the midst of the most horrific historical
situations.[20] Hope can be found in the most unexpected
places – especially in those individuals who chose to act for the good in
circumstances fraught with moral ambiguity.
[1] Tolkien laboured on the
ms. from 1937-49, and then prevaricated for years while attempting to find a
publisher who would release The Silmarillion simultaneously with LOTR;
finally, Tolkien gave in and accepted that The Silmarillion would not be
published and Unwin released LOTR, with the first volume published in
July 1954 (cf. Letters, pp. 443, 160); cf. Ordway, Holly, Tolkien’s
Faith, p. 259 (Tolkien had first submitted The Silmarillion for
publication in 1937: Carpenter, Humphrey, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography,
London: HarperCollins, 2002 [1977], p. 244).
[2] Tolkien’s
second and third sons – Michael and Christopher – both served in the RAF during
WWII.
[3] Cf. Aeschylus’ “Truth is the first casualty of war”.
[4] Nick Groom analyses the
War of the Ring in terms of just war theory, and finds that it does not meet
the criteria: idem, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning
of Middle-Earth Today, New York: Pegasus Books, 2023, pp. 269-94. This is not to say that Tolkien was
attempting anything like a “justification” of the Great War via LOTR;
rather, I would say that the novel simply reflects Tolkien’s experience of that
war, in all of its moral ambiguity; for the anti-Russian propaganda that
mobilized popular German support for WWI, cf. Ullrich,
Volker, Hitler: Ascent (1889—1939), New York: Vintage Books, 2016, pp. 50-51.
[5] Which, admittedly, did
not have a straightforwardly aggressive/pre-emptive nature, owing to the 8th-century
Muslim invasion of Gaul and subsequent defeat by the Franks at the Battle of
Tours, events which predated the first crusade (AD 1096) by more than three
centuries. The Reconquista would
finally result in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492. Also worthy of mention are the Holy Leagues
(14th-18th centuries), whose objective was to curb the
westward expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Europe.
[6] Cf. Bacevich, Andrew J.
America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, New York:
Random House, 2016, pp. 220-21.
[7] Cf. Rutledge, Fleming, The
Battle for Middle-earth, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, pp. 249-50.
[8] Cf. Groom, Nick, Tolkien
in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today, New York:
Pegasus Books, 2023, pp. 275-77; Tolkien acknowledged that there were “orcs” on
both sides of WWII: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, New York:
HarperCollins, 2006 [1981], p. 78.
[9] Groom,
Nick, Tolkien
in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today, New York:
Pegasus Books, 2023, p. 270.
[10] Over 300
soldiers/police personnel were also killed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas_attack_on_Israel
(accessed November 27, 2023). As of 3
December 2023, over 17,000 Palestinians in the Gaza strip have been killed due
to military operations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2023_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
(accessed December 7, 2023).
[11] Concerning the link
between the 1914 war and Tolkien’s love of Faërie, cf. Garth, John, Tolkien
and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, Boston & New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, p. 293.
For the realism of the tactical similarities between battles Tolkien
participated in and those depicted in the legendarium, cf. Ibid. pp.
298-99 (C.S. Lewis concurred: Ibid. p. 311). Indeed, Garth insists that LOTR’s
poignancy is due to Tolkien’s experience of the Great War: Ibid, p. 309.
[12] Gandhi’s remarks in
1938 concerning the question of Jewish settlements in Palestine and that of the
situation of the Jews in Germany are noteworthy. Gandhi was distressed that Jews from Europe
had sought to enter Palestine “under the shadow of the British gun”. Gandhi acknowledged that “the German persecution
of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history. The tyrants of old never went so mad as
Hitler seems to have done”. He accepted
that “if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity,
a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would
be completely justified”. Gandhi still
hoped that Hitler could be resisted by other than violent means. He urged the Jews of Germany to wage a campaign
of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
Martin Buber wrote an open letter to Gandhi, insisting that he did not
understand the plight of the Jews in Germany.
Had Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited Gandhi as he had planned to do (Gandhi
had granted his request) in 1934, could he have returned to Germany and
mobilized his fellow Christians in a non-violent resistance movement against
the Nazis? cf. Guha, Ramachandra, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World (1914—1948),
New York: Vintage Books, 2018, pp. 534-39.
[13] Letters, p. 179.
[14] Ibid.
[15] The Fellowship of
the Ring, p. 67: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is
given us”.
[16] Over 200 million people
were “killed or allowed to die by human decision” during the 20th
century: https://cissm.umd.edu/research-impact/publications/deaths-wars-and-conflicts-20th-century.
[17] The question of whether
Christians should limit themselves to doing their best within the present
reality as opposed to making efforts to change that reality seems not to have
been discussed in either of Tolkien’s worlds.
The case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is fascinating in this regard…
[18] Cf. The Return of
the King, pp. 1306-35.
[19] Two years before his
death, Tolkien began writing a sequel to LOTR in which evil returned…
[20] Letters, p. 76;
cf. Groom, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 245-94 for
(the absence of) “rules of war” in LOTR.
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